At PeerIslands, we are a team of top software development talent that helps our clients improve customer service, reduce costs, accelerate their digital journey, and enhance the functionality of their existing platforms and solutions. When we started in 2018, we quickly grew in our Cayman Islands nearshore delivery center and gained a reputation as a high-quality development house. As we expanded, we transformed our approach to better serve our clients.

Our first strategic decision was to align with MongoDB, our database platform of choice, which allowed us to grow our expertise and become the MongoDB Boutique partner of the year for 2021-23.

Second, we also expanded our delivery approach by adding an India delivery center; capturing talent quickly, expanding to meet increased demand, and establishing an offshore price point with skilled engineers.

Third, we looked at adjacent areas to help our clients, realizing the need to structure the underlying data and provide those applications with real-time information. This set of skills allowed us to offer our clients the ability to create a personalized flexible digital experience for their customers and gain real-time insights into their needs and behaviors.

How we are leveraging AI to continue to improve our business.

We invest in top talent that bring curious minds to the table, always seeking to improve and architect a better way to help our clients. Over the past 5 years, we helped our clients modernize their applications and build digital engagement with their customers. Along the way, we built a number of tools to streamline repetitive, low-value parts of application development, remediation, and migration. For example, we hand-built tools to streamline test data generation and accelerate query and code conversion. These tools were slightly configurable but required core platform tweaking based on the client’s environment. Leveraging these automated tools, we were often able to reduce human expert effort by 30-40%.

About a year and a half ago, Large Language models and Generative AI technology became available. With these technologies, we suddenly had access to mature, complex models that could streamline our existing tools and make them more configurable.

Our team explored ways to utilize Gen AI technology to enhance our work, and the outcome has been remarkable. With Gen AI, we can now migrate legacy applications to new platforms 80% faster than the traditional approach of manual coding. Additionally, previously challenging variations in clients’ environments that required manual tuning of our tools can now be managed by the advanced AI tools themselves.

Our PeerAI tools (patent-pending) can transform applications that have been running on expensive, outdated servers into cost-effective, modern ones. Our tools can analyze legacy code, recommend code conversion, generate test data, and analyze new code output. They can even help migrate data into the future state application, all in a fraction of the time it would take with traditional methods. With this approach, we have created a better way to help our clients and have also developed a new tool.

Although every company’s journey exploring AI in their operations is unique, there are universal benefits in some of the lessons we learned in our journey.

Three Lessons from our AI Journey

First, to achieve success, it is important to have a motivated and skilled workforce that is open to new ideas. Our team consists of talented and inquisitive engineers who are carefully chosen through a rigorous selection process. We have created an inclusive and  collaborative work environment that encourages teamwork. This has resulted in a high-performing team that consistently strives to exceed expectations and deliver top-notch services to our clients.

To enable our team to perform at their best, we believe in fostering a strong culture of innovation and investing in the necessary tools and resources. This is why we prioritize training, education, and testing for our staff. We encourage them to develop new skills and explore emerging technologies, such as AI, which can help them generate new and innovative ideas for our clients. Additionally, we invest in innovation through events like hackathons, which bring our team together to collaborate on developing creative solutions to both current and future client needs.

Many organizations may not have access to the engineering talent that we often take for granted here at PeerIslands. For those organizations, we recommend two possible approaches.

First, it is best to hire top talent in the AI space. Most industry leaders believe that AI will affect all businesses, so it is crucial for organizations to embrace it or risk falling behind their competitors. By bringing in AI experts, you can analyze customer needs, review offers, and create an AI strategy. It’s important to make this a strategic effort with KPIs set for the leadership team.

Alternatively, if an organization is unable to find enough skilled talent, they can seek help from firms like PeerIslands. PeerIslands has experienced consultants who have gone through the AI journey and can provide guidance.

“Start simple” is the second tip for incorporating AI into your operations and offers. Identify the areas that are easy to achieve and yet provide value. This will give you some quick wins that will provide a return on investment that can be reinvested in further effort to incorporate AI. At PeerIslands, we followed this approach by looking at the tasks that we had to repeat and that did not necessarily require a highly skilled engineer to accomplish. Automating these tasks was our “easy button”. For example, we built an engine that could take simple parameters and quickly create thousands of records. This sped up our testing process, improved our testing of code, as we could better test the platform under load, and it improved the lives of our team as they did not have to create the records by hand.

Third, it is important to determine an approach and take proactive steps towards implementing AI. Some clients may prefer to establish an AI Center of Excellence by centralizing the necessary skills and forming a dedicated team that works collaboratively with other business areas to brainstorm, plan and integrate AI across the organization. However, this requires strong commitment and support from the leadership to empower this team. It is crucial to have skilled and knowledgeable resources that can focus on identifying and addressing low-hanging fruit opportunities to start with.

We adopted a unique approach to develop our AI tooling. Our organizational structure is flat and consists of peers who worked on creating or transforming applications for our clients. Teams started experimenting with Generative AI tech and LLMs to accomplish their tasks and shared their success with others. In addition, we sponsored hackathons to explore and leverage this technology. The experiments snowballed into prototypes of the approach that we eventually patented. At that point, we allocated resources to centralize, refine, and productize the solution. We also dedicated talent to help us sell and implement the solution with clients.

We hope sharing our journey has been helpful.  We encourage you to aggressively look at how AI can improve your business.  If you would like to have further conversation, please reach out to AI@peerislands.io